ARTICLES ABOUT LAHORE BY DATE - PAGE 5

It's been battered by a suicide attack, residents are traumatized and officials have been sharply criticized for failing to provide clean water, decent food or basic health care. A community in Pakistan's troubled frontier area? A camp for displaced people fleeing the fighting in the Swat Valley? No, the Lahore Zoo. Nature lovers and former board members say a long history of mismanagement and inhumane treatment at the 137-year-old zoo jeopardizes the very animals it's supposed to protect.

Militants detonated two bombs in a busy market and attacked two police checkpoints in northern Pakistan on Thursday, killing at least 14 people, wounding scores more and testing the resolve of the government as it takes on the Taliban in the Swat Valley. The attacks in Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan happened within two hours of each other and a day after an assault on security forces in the eastern city of Lahore killed around 30 people. That strike was claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, who warned of further attacks unless the government called off the Swat offensive.

Bomb blasts tore through a busy market and a pair of police checkpoints in the volatile area near the Afghan border Thursday, killing at least 14 people and raising the specter that militants retaliating for an army offensive will unleash a campaign of violence against Pakistan's cities. Assailants detonated bombs on two motorcycles outside Peshawar's Qissa Khawani market as shoppers milled about, Pakistani police said. At least six people were killed and more than 50 injured. Later, police found four suspects hiding in a nearby hotel.

Officers guarding buildings for some of the Pakistani heartland's top police and intelligence officials saw the gunmen jump out of a white van at their gate. The assailants, wearing white shirts and trousers, sprayed gunfire in the air and at police. One tossed a grenade in the direction of officers who had begun firing back. Then, on a bustling workday morning in the heart of Pakistan's second-largest city, the explosives-laden van rammed the steel gate and detonated. The blast razed an emergency services building and sheared off a wall from the intelligence agency building next door.

Pakistani authorities Monday blamed Taliban-linked militants for a bloody daylong assault on a police academy outside the eastern city of Lahore that left at least 20 people dead, including at least four assailants. In a methodical strike, heavily armed gunmen stormed the training center as recruits gathered for morning drills. The assailants held off elite army and paramilitary troops for nearly eight hours before being overpowered. At least three attackers blew themselves up as troops overran their last stronghold, an upper floor in the compound's main building.

Twin suicide bombs that killed at least 31 people and injured 200 in the eastern city of Lahore on Tuesday deepened the crisis in the troubled nation and increased pressure on embattled President Pervez Musharraf, blamed by many for instability in the country. One bomb targeted the seven-story headquarters of the federal police, which investigates terrorism and human trafficking, and killed at least 16 officers, police officials said. Another car bomb exploded at a house near the rented Lahore home of Asif Ali Zardari, leader of the Pakistan People's Party, which won the largest number of seats in last month's parliamentary elections.

The latest in a series of suicide bombings has raised concerns that militants are trying to gain ground in Pakistan as the country waits for the winning opposition party to cobble together a coalition government. A prestigious naval war college in the normally quiet city of Lahore was the target Tuesday when two suicide bombers killed at least four people and injured 16 others. It was the fifth suicide attack since the Feb. 18 elections in which opposition parties routed allies of President Pervez Musharraf.

A suicide blast Thursday that killed at least 22 people, most of them police, was the latest in an accelerating string of such attacks in Pakistan that has claimed the lives of nearly 800 people over the past year and spread to areas previously untouched by extremist bombs. The suicide bombing, in a cordon of police outside the Lahore High Court, was the first ever to strike the eastern city of Lahore. The rise in such attacks, including the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, has turned the struggling country into the newest target of widespread suicide bombings, analysts said.

Plunged into darkness and chaos, Shahid Khan used the light from his cell phone to escape the wreckage of an express train that had been taking holiday travelers home. It was 2 a.m., and what was left of the train, crowded with 900 people heading from Karachi to near Lahore in southern Pakistan, lay scattered about a waterlogged field, with cries from the trapped and injured ringing out. At least 58 people died and 150 more were injured when about 12 of the 16 cars came off the rails near Mehrabpur.